Haunted by Atrocity Read online

  The final paragraphs of the committee’s report offered a defense of the Confederate prison system. Admitting that “privation, suffering, and mortality, to an extent much to be regretted, did prevail” in places like Andersonville, Salisbury, and the Richmond prisons, the committee insisted that it was “not the result of neglect” or “design, on the part of the Confederate government.” Instead, the report cited “haste in preparation; crowded quarters, prepared only for a smaller number; want of transportation, and scarcity of food” as the causes of the suffering, all of which “resulted from the pressure of the war and the barbarous manner in which it has been conducted by our enemies.”86 J. B. Jones, a Confederate War Department clerk, confirmed these sentiments in his diary. Upon hearing about the shocking mortality at Andersonville, Jones summed up the Confederate quandary, writing “that climate is fatal to them; but the government cannot feed them here, and the enemy won’t exchange.” According to Jones and the Confederate committee, the “savage warfare” of the Union, including such practices as the blockade, the confiscation and destruction of food and medicines, and the incineration of homes, crops, and tools, prevented the proper treatment of Union prisoners by the Confederacy.87 Resting their case, the Confederate leaders declared that the Union was “desolating our country, in violation of the usages of civilized warfare,” while simultaneously refusing “to exchange prisoners” and had “forced us to keep 50,000 of their men in captivity.” The hypocritical Union then dared “to attribute to us the sufferings and privations caused by their own acts. We cannot doubt that in the view of civilization we shall stand acquitted, while they must be condemned.”88

  The Confederate report, like its Union counterpart, qualifies as a propaganda masterpiece. Leaving aside the accurate description of the Union’s political manipulation of the prison controversy and the admission that Union prisoners suffered greatly in the Confederacy, the bulk of the document represented a distortion of reality. Instead of accepting responsibility, Confederate leaders chose to hide behind the excuse that somehow losing the war justified the mistreatment of their Union captives. This position ignored the consistent effort to politicize the status of prisoners of war, as the Confederacy did throughout the conflict. The delusional statements about African American soldiers in the Civil War minimized the centrality of racial equality as a legitimate cause of the war and stood as an unapologetic defense of the Confederacy’s amoral “black flag” conduct. The report also concealed the fact that Confederate leaders such as Secretary of War James Seddon preferred to ignore the growing misery. Even worse were the actions of Commissary General of Subsistence Lucius Northrop, who, on his own authority, intentionally inflicted unnecessary suffering on Union prisoners by withholding rations and other supplies that, even in the last months of the war, existed and could have lessened the misery of Union captives. And like his foil Lincoln, President Davis, never shy in his efforts to centralize the Confederate war effort, clearly knew about the brutal conditions imposed upon prisoners held by the Confederacy yet chose to look the other way.89 In retrospect, these canards issued by the Davis administration, like the Confederacy itself, fail to convince. But the truth of 1865 was that what remained to southerners, doomed to defeat, was their honor, and the arguments outlined in the report provided ammunition for future defenders of the Confederacy’s handling of prisoners.

  No aspect of the Civil War revealed its cold inhumanity more than the treatment of prisoners by both the Union and the Confederacy. The reason for the perpetration of atrocity toward Civil War prisoners was clear—it furthered the war aims of both participants—and the responsibility lay on both sides. The appalling death rates of Civil War prisoners resulted from a culture bent on destruction, and both North and South insisted on wreaking that devastation even on its unarmed captives. Unfortunately for prisoners, the reality that they were placeholders for the fundamental issues of the war—racial equality, Confederate sovereignty, moral superiority—ensured their suffering. Their status as prisoners, dependent on the mercies of their captors, offered little protection in a confrontation characterized by consumptive wrath. The most frightening aspect of the entire prison tragedy was the sanctimonious outrage generated in response to their opponent’s atrocities even as Americans, North and South, accepted, with unquestioning swiftness, their own brutality. War, regrettably, especially a fratricidal conflict like the Civil War, by its nature clouds judgment and lures people into actions that appear essential, but of course are not.

  A further injustice endured long after 1865. Throughout the Civil War both governments consistently manipulated the prison trauma for political gain. Using Civil War prisons as fodder for propaganda benefited the war effort in that it lessened criticism of the refusal to exchange and focused the building anger over the treatment of prisoners on the actions of the enemy. In doing so, the emotional controversy, driven by inherent confusion about who was exactly to blame for prison casualties and by lingering guilt about the 56,000 dead prisoners, escalated into a rhetorical war within the larger conflict. Vindicating the Union or Confederate treatment of prisoners became an opportunity to prove the justice of each side’s cause and a means to assert moral superiority over a depraved, uncivilized enemy. Patriotic northerners and southerners ignored their own failings and decried those of their opponents instead. But the end of the war did not mean the end of the illusion. The reality of unleashing destruction, of course, is that the bitter feelings last. The painful controversy remained raw precisely because of the frequent and remarkable employment of each section’s divisive memories of Civil War prisons in cajoling both a devotion to cause and justification for violence. The hardened animosities created and intentionally nurtured during the war would prove surprisingly durable in the reunited nation.

  2

  “Remember Andersonville”

  RECRIMINATION DURING RECONSTRUCTION, 1865–1877

  In May 1865, amid the excitement of the transition from war to peace, Union troops arrested a Confederate officer, Captain Henry Wirz, the camp commandant of Andersonville Prison, and transported him to Washington. There the wrath of the enraged northern citizenry awaited him. During the operation of Andersonville, approximately 13,000 Union soldiers out of the 45,000 unfortunate souls housed there died. Those statistics meant that the Georgia prison camp, both in the percentage of fatalities and in sheer numbers, distinguished itself as the deadliest Civil War prison. But the scale of the casualties represented only one of the reasons for the focus on Wirz. Northern anger over the Confederacy’s prisons continued to build and needed an outlet for its release. At the war’s conclusion, the Committee on the Conduct of the War further inflamed public opinion when it published a sweeping denunciation of the Confederacy’s amoral prosecution of the Civil War, a report that included over twenty pages of statements about the suffering occurring in Confederate prisons.1 With Wirz already in custody, such accounts of the terrible prison conditions in the northern press added to the grief and resentment over Lincoln’s assassination. These emotions made Wirz a natural target in the charged postwar environment. Over the next few months, the question of Wirz’s fate made headlines across America. His trial and the nature of the proceedings helped assure that the bitter memories of the treatment of prisoners of war remained as strong throughout Reconstruction as during the Civil War itself.2

  Beginning with Wirz’s arrest in May, the American public seemed riveted to the events surrounding his trial, which commenced in August and ended in October. The northern press avidly covered the story and railed against the crimes that Wirz, supposedly at the behest of the Confederate government, conspired to commit against the Union prisoners. According to northern popular opinion, the callous brutality demonstrated at Andersonville by Wirz and his co-conspirators typified the barbaric nature of the rebellious South. The animosity directed toward Wirz grew so vociferous as the trial approached that many declared him not just guilty, but an inhuman monster. A July 1865 New York Times editorial de
manded that “some expiation must be exacted for the most infernal crime of the century.”3 In an August edition of Harper’s Weekly an editor judged, “of his guilt there can be no doubt,” even though the trial was still in its initial stages.4 A series of illustrations depicting the Andersonville atrocities, including one of Wirz stomping on a prisoner, appeared in Harper’s in September.5 These engravings hardened northern sentiment against the yet-to-be-convicted Confederate officer. In October, another Times article compared the “diabolical and fiendish” Wirz to a “tiger sporting with its helpless prey.”6 Such biased press coverage indicated the climate of hatred that Wirz’s presence incited in the North during 1865. One reflection of that anger exists in the diary of Abram Parmenter, a member of the Veterans Reserve Corps stationed in Washington, D.C., during the Wirz trial. On August 25, Parmenter was outraged by “some astounding facts brought to light—in regard to the brutal and inhuman treatment of prisoners.” The next day, Parmenter described the trial as “a sickening tale of suffering.” When the Wirz defense commenced on September 27, Parmenter dismissed it as “rather feble.”7 The anti-Wirz hysteria, demonstrated by the press and confirmed by public opinion, meant that long before the trial concluded, northerners like Parmenter were already convinced of Wirz’s guilt.

  The public vitriol directed at Wirz encouraged the inflammatory rhetoric used by the prosecution during the legal proceedings. The trial commenced on August 21 before a military tribunal. The federal government—represented by its lead attorney, Colonel Norton Parker Chipman—initially hoped to prove the existence of a massive conspiracy to murder brutally Union prisoners by the thousands among Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, John Winder, Wirz, and other leading Confederate officials.8 Along with the charge of conspiracy, Wirz stood accused of over a dozen murders of Andersonville prisoners. Although Secretary of War Edwin Stanton halted the proceedings and forced the overzealous Chipman to remove the names of the Confederate leaders specifically charged in the conspiracy with Wirz, the firm northern belief in the reality of the plot never wavered. Since the fate of Davis still remained undecided, Stanton and the federal government balked at implicating the ex-Confederate president in the Wirz matter. When the trial resumed on August 23, Wirz faced two revised charges. The first charge stated that Wirz conspired with unknown others “to impair and injure the health and destroy the lives of large numbers of federal prisoners.” The second accused Wirz of thirteen separate murders of unknown Union prisoners at Andersonville.9 As scholars have pointed out, the language of the ten pages of charges, with repeated references to Wirz as “malicious,” “evil,” “cruel,” and “wicked,” set the tone for the prosecution’s portrayal of Wirz throughout the trial.10 By demonizing Wirz, Chipman and the government desired not only to pin responsibility for the prison atrocities on the shoulders of individuals like Wirz but also to remind posterity of the inherently corrupt and evil nature of the Confederate South.

  Throughout the proceedings, the prosecution continued to rail against the inhuman cruelty of Wirz. “Mortal man,” Chipman declared, “has never been called to answer before a legal tribunal to a catalogue of crime like this.” But despite his insistence that Wirz bore responsibility for the “long black catalogue of crimes, these tortures unparalleled,” Chipman saved much of his venom for the Confederacy itself. “With what detestation,” he stated, “must civilized nations regard that government whose conduct has been such as characterized this pretended confederacy.” The “treasonable conspiracy” of the South against the Union prisoners of war resulted not from “retaliation, punishment, nor ignorance of the law,” Chipman explained; rather “it was the intrinsic wickedness of a few desperate leaders, seconded by mercenary and heartless monsters, of whom the prisoner before you is a fair type.” Chipman further argued that individuals such as Wirz, Winder, and implicitly Davis and others deliberately worsened the already difficult conditions for the Union prisoners. The deaths of Union captives occurred because of the cruelty of these “diabolical” men in charge of the Confederate prison system, men representative of a “murderous” rebellion. Throughout the trial, the prosecution presented Andersonville as a moral outrage perpetuated by one fiendish individual in the service of a fiendish cause. Judge Joseph Holt, the judge advocate general in charge of the proceedings, spoke for many in his closing statement: “This work of death seems to have been a saturnalia of enjoyment for the prisoner, who amid these savage orgies evidenced such exultation and mingled with them such nameless blasphemy and ribald jest, as at times to exhibit him rather as a demon than a man.” The toleration of such cruelty in the Confederacy naturally correlated to the inherently barbaric nature of the treasonous South. The consistent juxtaposition of Wirz’s individual crimes with the general accusations of endemic Confederate brutality sufficed to explain the prison casualties in the minds of many in the North.11

  In looking for someone to declare culpable for the horrors of Civil War prisons, the U.S. government found a perfect target in Wirz. He proved to be a malleable symbol of the Civil War prison controversy at a time when confusion abounded concerning what actually happened at Andersonville and other prison camps. In reality, Wirz was no mass murderer but simply an ineffective and callous officer placed in a position of authority in a Confederate prison system defined by those same characteristics. The natural result of that unfortunate combination, in an era of relative medical primitivism, meant death on a massive scale. But descriptions of Wirz as a “monster” motivated by inhuman malice made political sense because it offered the angry northern public a demonic figure on which to focus their outrage. And the relatively innocuous official status of Wirz, as a mere captain, allowed the government to place responsibility for the prison debacle on the Confederacy without further stirring up the emotions of southerners, as a trial of Jefferson Davis might have done. Wirz’s background as a Swiss immigrant also facilitated the campaign against him because he lacked the credentials and connections of other Confederate leaders. In a nativist political culture, it was far more politically expedient to blame a lone, expendable immigrant than to put Davis, a former U.S. senator and secretary of war, on trial for Andersonville.12 And even though Wirz received the blame, Chipman and Judge Holt never missed an opportunity to remind the public that Wirz represented the “spirit” of “murderous cruelty and baseness” that characterized “the inner and real life of the rebellion, and the hellish criminality and brutality of the traitors who maintained it.”13 Although the prosecution tried him as an individual, Wirz became the personification of southern brutality—evidence of the debased and dehumanized character of traitors. Even though the fate of Wirz alone hung in the balance, the trial process accomplished the goals of political leaders such as Stanton. The proceedings reinforced northern convictions concerning Civil War prisons by explaining the suffering at Andersonville and other Confederate prisons as singularly cruel, unlike the supposedly humane Union prisons.

  Other prejudices worked against Wirz as well. Though a legitimate legal process, military law differed from the more exacting standards of civil law. Military justice, according to historian Gayla Koerting, allowed for the inclusion of “circumstantial evidence” in the trial record, unlike a traditional court of law. The resulting predisposition against Wirz by the tribunal was deemed acceptable because the officers prosecuting Wirz were “men of honor” who could be relied upon to rule appropriately.14 Other scholars have suggested that regardless of the honor at stake, the “intimate ‘old boy’ relationship that existed between the prosecution and the members of the military commission” cast serious doubt on the “intellectual integrity” of the military tribunal.15 These inherent flaws in the nature of military justice, especially given the emotional intensity created by the constant commotion over the prisoner-of-war issue, doomed Wirz even before the trial and obscured significant flaws in the government’s prosecution of the case. Of the 160 witnesses who testified, 145 stated that they never saw Wirz kill a prisoner; moreover, those who
insisted that Wirz committed murder failed to name any of the victims.16

  The trial culminated in an inevitable verdict of guilty, and Wirz received a death sentence. He rebuffed last-minute efforts to convince him to declare Davis the architect of the Andersonville conspiracy in exchange for clemency.17 On November 10, 1865, spectators assembled around the gallows hurled cries of “remember Andersonville” at Wirz.18 The chant grew louder as he ascended the steps. The trap door opened, and with the cheers of an exultant crowd ringing in his ears, Wirz joined many of his former wards in death. Wirz became the only ex-Confederate officer executed for conspiring against POWs during the Civil War.

  In the midst of the northern celebration over Wirz’s death, a few lonely southerners such as Robert Kean, now a former Confederate War Department official, took offense at the trial, insisting that it represented a mockery of justice. “The real object,” Kean wrote in his diary, “is to make a case against Davis and Seddon, or at least blacken them.” Kean perceived the proceedings as a smokescreen designed to divert northern attention from the real culprit behind the prison suffering, Edwin Stanton. “That official,” Kean argued, “preferred for thousands to perish miserably, in the effort to [have federal prisoners] eat Confederate corn from the Confederate armies.” “The perfidy by which the cartel was abrogated was a settled policy to starve the Confederacy,” Kean continued, “though thousands of their own men starved and rotted with scurvy.”19 As for the charge of conspiracy, former Confederate doctor Randolph Stevenson made a simple yet compelling argument: “Captain Wirz could not conspire alone.”20 No other Confederate official went to trial for the Andersonville crimes, although had he not died shortly before the end of the war, General Winder, as the Confederate commissary general of prisons, would probably have faced charges. Wirz himself recognized that in his case, justice reflected popular opinion: “I know how hard it is for one, helpless and unfriended as I am, to control against the prejudices produced by popular culture and long continued misrepresentation.”21 In defeat, however, the similarly one-sided nature of these defensive southern arguments, which conveniently minimized the racism and intent that lay behind the conditions in Confederate prisons, barely registered. Northerners ignored these protests and continued rejoicing over their revenge.